A third bridge for preservationists is built around one of the other seven enactments of Generativity Three. The preservation of an old tradition can take place through engagement of a regularly occurring ceremony that preserves long-standing traditions, such as the Friday night Jewish Shabbat. It can also be engaged through the designation of sacred places where specific rituals are preserved and enacted—such as the high mass in Catholic cathedrals. In the Islam religion, a series of daily prayers are enacted. Traditions are preserved either in a majestic Mosque or on a simple prayer rug located in the observant’s home or office. Such forms of preservation align directly with the power of the tangible culture motivation that we identified in a previous essay in this series. Specific physical and verbal actions, often occurring in specified sacred locations, enhance the sense of preservation and do honor to the nature of the traditions that lie behind them.
We have reviewed but a few of the ways in which preservation of the old and revered take place in societies throughout the world. Now we move on to a second kind of preservation: the preservation of land in its natural state. There is an abundance of land preservation initiatives in the United States, beginning with the National Parks. As noted in the informative documentary produced by Ken Burns, the United States was at the forefront in declaring that beautiful, natural settings should be preserved and made available to all citizens (unlike conditions that existed at the time in Europe where places of beauty were often owned by the wealthy aristocracy who blocked all public access). National political leaders like Teddy Roosevelt, advocate naturalists like John Muir, and wealthy business leaders like John D. Rockefeller joined together to provide the generative power and resources needed to enable much of the most beautiful land in the United States to be set aside and preserved as national parks and monuments.
Many other areas in the United States have been set aside for natural preservation. One of our favorites is Baxter State Park in Maine. The park was established by 28 donations of land, in trust, from former governor Percival Baxter between the years of 1931 and 1962 (eventually creating a park of over 200,000 acres). As governor, Baxter unsuccessfully campaigned for the direct purchase of this land by the state government. After leaving office, he bought the land himself for public use but outside formal government control. As a result, Baxter Park is not part of the Maine State Park system. Rather it is governed by the Baxter State Park Authority, consisting of the Maine Attorney General, the Maine Commissioner of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife, and Director of the Maine Forest Service.
There are now even greater initiatives occurring throughout the world to preserve land. One of the most ambitious and well-documented is the purchase and preservation of substantial land (equal in size to Yellowstone National Park) in a region of the West coast of South America known as Patagonia. A husband-and-wife team (Kristine and Douglas Tompkins), who had been very successful entrepreneurs in the United States, began purchasing this beautiful but vulnerable land before it could be altered with dams, tourism, and urban sprawl. Established as Conservacion Patagonica, this largescale preservation initiative has attracted donors and environmental activists from across the world. The sportswear that many of us wear (“Patagonia”) was the original funding source for Conservacion Patagonica. We find an extraordinarily ambitious realization of the Generativity Three spirit in the work of the Tomkins and their preservation-oriented colleagues.
